Mala Frontend Layout

Found this site, http://malafe.net/

check out the Layouts for examples. Some very nice ready to download or to give inspiration to create one yourself.

My favorite so far:  the Mameroom

Almost finished

The end result! What fun it was to create this. There are a few things left to make it 100%

- The bezel exists of 4 seperate pieces mounted together, this will be replaced by one piece of wood using a router. But this takes some practice and maybe a router table to make it easy.
- To Power up the system you have to remove the backdoor and push the original pc switch. It's cooler to have the switch at the back, not such a problem to fix.
-Clean up the wires inside the cabinet. Lot's of loose cables have to be tight together.

-Create a MAME fronted. Í'm still a bit in doubt wich one to use. Hyperspin looks great but it's a bit too much. Not running so smooth on this setup. MALA and Maximun Arcade look promising. I'm not realy interested in the other emulators, only MAME.  An article about this will be written in the blog if i spent some more time on this!

The backdoor. What to tell ;) The 2 green buttons at the top left are on this foto not mounted correctly yet. They are pushed back in the wood now. The function of these are TEST SW and SERVICE SW, meant for original PCB'S.

I read somewhere a tip to place a black&white print behind the color print to protect the darkcolors from being over-lighted. Tried this but it blurred the whole picture. Now it's very bright, with the disadvantage of the dark parts over-lighted. The Marquee is printed on a high quality laserprinter on normal paper. A wish for me is to order the same picture at quality material, like they do at gameongrafix etc. On the wishlist!

The plexi was cut with the smallest jigsaw blade available in the local store. It's a 1-2mm metal blade. They normally cut anti-skid board with it for instance.
Worked well. Cut a medium speed, not to slow and fast or it will break/melt.

The Arcade powered on! My son playing Sega Hang-On. He likes the race games. Enduro Racer, Crazy Race, Outrun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuYRR6E8Dw

Painting

After the sanding and putty prepartion on the wood 2 layers of primer were done.
Last week I painted the cabinet totally black but was really not pleased at all with the result. It looked to 'hard' for a kids room. So I decided to get rid of the black on the side of the cabinet, prime it once more and paint it with a orange tone matching the side art stickers color scheme (see previous blog post)

In total 3 ground layers and 3 color layers.

paint details:
side: Histor Satin flexa colors e3.35.72
kickplate: Histor Satin black 6372

 

Marquee preparation

Look here the preparation of the marquee. The TL is from the kitchen, we have a kitchen that is 15 years old falling apart. 

The TL has a new purpose!

2 speaker grills get mounted. The holes are drilled with a special hole drill. I experienced you have to slowly presure the drill and increase speed slow for maximum result. To much preasure and the drill gets stuck.

Inside the cabinet

No concern about space inside the cabinet there is room enough for the hardware. Except maybe a SNK Neo Geo board, but I'll keep that board for another project.

First thing mounted is the power connector box and shortened all power cords.
For the TL behind the marguee,  for the audio setup, for the PC power adapter and one for the monitor.

The motherboard and J-Pac are mounted with some PCB mountingfeet.

equipment: AMD Sempron 3000, gigabyte motherboard from a former Packard-Bell pc.Wifi card,  Philips stereo soundsystem with subwoofer (he, why not :). DELL 17"monitor TFT and a really quiet DELL PSU from an optiplex GX280. 64mb AGP card (needed for performance! see previous blog message)

The wires on the harness are taped together. I advise you to do this or else everything gets messed up. I'll fix the rest of the wires after connecting the firebutton 4,5 and 6 to the J-PAC (since the standard jamma harness can only connect button 1,2 and 3). One of the power connectors from the PSU is used for Grounding (black), the yellow cable for 12v in the iluminated credit button and the red one is terminated. If i'm correct you can use the red cable if you have LED lights. The board is powered up by the button from the orignal casing, i'd like to change this to something accessible from outside of the cabinet. But for now it's ok this way.

Computer problems solved

Thanks to the help of forum members at http://www.arcadecontrols.com/ i've figured out what the cause of the performance delay was. It's the onboard VGA card.

This takes a part of processor time / memory sharing, leaving less available for MAME emulation. For that reason now the system uses a dedicated AGP VGA card 64MB.

The classic games run smooth now! thanks again, discussion can be followed here.

J-PAC problems

A small update.
I lost some time with testing the J-pac. The board I had was corrupted. Questions and answers about Ultimarc hardware can be found at http://www.mameworld.info
check this link for the problem with my hardware: Mameworld Forum

It works now with a new board. But now the second problem; the PC seems to slow to my surprise. It runs on a AMD Sempron 3000, 1.8ghz Windows XP.
Still, if you run Bagman or Donkey Kong it's so slow, there is too much delay. How is this possible since Mame cabinets are build since 15 years now or something and this PC is from 2006. If anyone has an idea please let me know. I'm going to replace the hardware next week, but i'm curious why itt doesn't run fine on this PC hardware.